Launchbar 5.5 With Added Snippets And Added Awesomeness

Launchbar users can enjoy a brand new feature in v5.5 of the find-everything Mac app. Launchbar – if you’re not familiar with it – is an app that you trigger with a shortcut (I use ⌘-Space) and then type into the pop-up window. Launchbar instantly presents results, letting you launch apps, send emails, play music, browse your iPhoto library and a whole lot more. And now it has snippets.

Snippets are a lot like what you’ll find in apps like TextExpander, letting you quickly add oft-used chunks of text with just a few keystrokes. The trick that Launchbar Brings is that you don’t even have to remember the shortcuts you set to trigger the snippets – you can just instantly search on them in the same way you’d find anything in Launchbar.

This means that you could uses TextExpander for most of your regular snippets (plus the ones you want synced to TextExpander Touch on iOS) and keep the rarely-used ones in Launchbar. You can even use placeholders to insert variable text, like the date and time, or the contents of your clipboard.

I switched to Alfred on the MacBook Air, but still use Launchbar on my iMac. I’m thinking of switching back for both Macs: not just for the snippets, but because I have been using Launchbar for so long that it’s almost impossible to retrain my hands to use Alfred’s methods.